Spheres of Influence or Pragmatic Relations?
With seemingly little fanfare, the European Union extended its hand across six countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc: Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, launching the EU Eastern Partnership (EaP) in Prague yesterday, 7 May 2009.
According to the EU, the Eastern Partnership aims to add a “multilateral” dimension to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which was launched in 2003 to promote bilateral relations with EU’s neighbours including the Mediterranean states in North Africa. The ENP has been criticized as being too cumbersome to affect any changes in the many countries included in its mandate to promote democracy and good governance. Thus the Eastern Partnership was conceived. At a more localized level, the Eastern Partnership also aims to promote “better governance and economic development at its Eastern borders,” but already Russia has expressed scepticism of the EaP. In a report by RIA Novosti on 28 April 2009, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, stated that “We heard an announcement from Brussels that this is not an attempt to create a new sphere of influence and that it is not a process which is directed against Russia. We want to believe in this guarantee but I won’t deny that some comments on the initiative made by the EU have concerned us.” The EU denies any such attempt at creating spheres of influence at its Eastern flank. But certainly, the six countries included in the EaP seek to deepen its relations with the EU, and Ukraine for one has made no secret of its desire to be a member.
Interestingly, some of the more value-oriented goals of the EaP are familiar to the ones in the Barents Cooperation: namely, goals of visa-free travel between countries, free trade, institution building, and democratization, and not least, people to people contact through “cultural cooperation and inter-cultural dialogue as an integral part of all external policies”. Thus far, however, EU member states such as Germany, have been opposed to instituting visa-free travel citing that the six signatories of the EaP have been sources of illegal immigration, migrant prostitution, drug-trafficking, etc.
While many criticisms had already been leveled at the EaP even before it was launched on 7 May 2009, what it accomplishes or not in the coming years may be a marker of what ensues in the border regions between an enlarged Europe, including Norway, and the Former Soviet Bloc and Russia.
By Aileen Espiritu, Senior Research Fellow atthe Barents Institute
